Author: Edward Helmore in New York

Tina Brown, Graydon Carter and others take stock of Wolfe’s long-form, stylized reportage that he helped popularize in the 1960s

For all of Tom Wolfe’s accomplishments in the genre of ‘new journalism’, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Right Stuff among them, perhaps none of Wolfe’s work has stood up as well as the The Bonfire of the Vanities, his satirical account of Manhattan-style power and justice in the 1980s. His depiction of the characters and values of the naked city, the intermingling of rich and poor, remains essentially unchallenged. The Guardian spoke to five figures well placed to take stock of Wolfe’s legacy in the long-form, stylized reportage that he helped to popularize in the 1960s.

America’s biggest bookstore chain has seen its sales slide for 11 years. With its stock price falling 8%, is the writing on the wall?

To the casual observer Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square seemed to be doing everything right last Thursday lunchtime: displays heaving with books; customers milling around; every table at the Starbucks on the third floor taken by customers; a creche full of excited children; magazine racks browsed.

To truly understand America’s super-rich, observe them as an anthropologist would … that’s what Wednesday Martin has done, and her memoir Primates of Park Avenue is provoking whoops of rage from wealthy wives

From Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, New York’s Upper East Side has long offered novelists and satirists a rich seam to mine. But until Wednesday Martin came along, no one had thought to use primatology in a portrait of one of America’s wealthiest – and most competitive – urban enclaves.

Martin, mother-of-two and wife of a banker, is the author of Primates of Park Avenue, part-memoir, part-study of young East Side mothers and their social customs. The book, published last week, has been variously described as sexist, harsh and inaccurate.

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